


two plus two equals five

by voodoochild



Category: The Hour
Genre: 1950s, Age Difference, Foursome - F/F/M/M, Literary References & Allusions, Multi, Racism, Wartime Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-24
Updated: 2012-11-24
Packaged: 2017-11-19 08:52:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/571451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The possibilities are endless. Now, there is a boy in rumpled suits whose earnestness hurts to look at. Now, there is a girl in red who just wants to be appreciated. And now, as there was then and has always been, there is a woman who is late nights and warm whiskey, mornings in bed and ink smudges all over his hands." (Wherein Mr. Brown needs to stop reading Orwell, Ms. Storm is a terrible enabler, Mr. Lyon makes interesting propositions, and Miss Rowley picks herself back up.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	two plus two equals five

**Author's Note:**

> For Em, and her prompt over at falseeyelashes' ficathon of _"Freddie/Bel/Lix/Randall, desire was thoughtcrime"_. Apologies to George Orwell and "1984" for the quotation-thievery and the disdain which certain characters hold for him.
> 
> Spoilers for episodes 1 & 2 of season two of the Hour - no further spoilers. Mostly canon-compliant, save for Randall drinking in this when he's a teetotaler in canon. Um, blame fascinating characterization and my assumption he'd be as much of a boozehound as everyone else.

_"And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?"_ \- George Orwell, 1984

He's read enough Orwell to know that you can rewrite your own history or have it rewritten for you.

Because once, he was a scrawny little shit who saw newsreels of Lenin and Mussolini and thought he knew what they were talking about. He'd thought the National Fascisti so smart, so right, racial purity and "smashing the pinks and reds and browns". Joining the army was only a natural extension - learn to adapt, learn to fight, learn to kill. The first time he raised a rifle he'd thrown up, and had gotten through basic mostly by pure bullheaded will. Iraq Command and then the Western Front cured him of any loyalty to the facists. 

Then came Spain, after that the War to End All Wars. He's seen enough bloodshed, enough men dying for other men's ideals. A man should have the freedom to write his own story.

And so, there are pockets of him in which Lix didn't leave him in Barcelona (alone in a packed-up flat with a bottle of whiskey and a note that said _I can't anymore. Please don't try to find me._ ). Where that bullet from the Somme hit two inches to the left, leaving him dead. Where he never enlisted, or left Glasgow. Endless permutations of might-have-beens, and while he's always gone a bit maudlin under the influence of drink, he's never actually made himself believe in possibilities before. 

Now, the possibilities are endless. Now, there is a boy in rumpled suits whose earnestness hurts to look at. Now, there is a girl in red who just wants to be appreciated. And now, as there was then and has always been, there is a woman who is late nights and warm whiskey, mornings in bed and ink smudges all over his hands. 

He is a fool; a stupidly hubristic fool, because he intends to keep them.

***

The first piece, unsurprisingly, was Paris. 

He has history with this city. Paris was that gulp of fresh air after the burn of Spain and a new sunrise for him and Lix. They'd lived in the tiniest flat imaginable, _bas-de-Montmartre_ , above a cabaret and next to the worst Italian restaurant in all of Europe. He still smells cigars and tomatoes in his dreams, when he remembers the years before the Germans invaded. Before they went back to Spain and before she left for good.

When he returns to mold the French desk of the BBC into his own vision, he spends most of his days being the martinet of the Rue Royale and dragging the station kicking and screaming into the 1950's. All is quiet for a few years, and then he begins to hear a name: Frederick Lyon. Due diligence brings him to the offices of _Le Canard enchaîné_ and their new editorial writer. The beautiful young man with his nose to the pulse of the times intrigues him, and so Randall had written a few old friends from the Guardian and the BBC and listened to the stories - brave, desperate boy, to challenge an entire nation.

( _Good for you, lad_ , Randall wants to tell him. _England needs shaking up_.)

Mr. Lyon barges into his office one day, smart grey tweed suit gone positively listless in the heat, and makes him the offer of a lifetime:

"The Hour needs a new head of news. You've seen my reels - I'll come back with you, be your new presenter, if you take the job."

Freddie makes more promises, both professional and thoroughly _un-_. There is a gleam in the boy's eye that draws Randall; a hunger to reveal, to expose society to both the best and worst in itself. 

He once saw that gleam in the mirror.

***

There is a name on the Foreign Desk in Lime Grove that makes him pause, and a bottle of _L'Aimant_ that used to sit on his bedside table.

A squeaky-voiced secretary sputters at him about touching Ms. Storm's - ah, still unmarried - things, but the bottle is the same weight and shape that he remembers. Tiny chip in the glass on the bottom corner; she'd usually had better aim.

"You're wasting your breath, Vicki. Mr. Brown is incapable of restraint when it comes to organization."

Beautiful elocution, cut-glass vowels and that bone-dry turn of phrase. Christ, he's missed her. 

"You know I always put things back in their proper places," he says, placing the bottle precisely one inch from her blotter and steeling himself to set eyes on Lix Storm for the first time in nineteen years. "There. "

And she is magnificent in all the ways he remembers; sand-colored trousers, truly frightening heels to put her on eye-level with him, burgundy waistcoat cut to show off her figure and pursed lips painted the same color, black curls falling into her eyes. He once knew the column of her vertebrae blind, could tell if she'd put on makeup by scent. He's seen her bloody and broken (caught by a pro-Franco mob in Cordoba, stubborn, _impossible_ woman just refusing to leave when she hadn't gotten her shot) and gloriously whole (the last time, silhouetted in amber glow, slow and desperate and the both of them knowing something was going to have to give). 

He thinks looking at her will get easier, but then she taps her pencil and raises her eyebrow behind her glasses, and no. It doesn't.

It won't. 

He isn't good at looking without touching.

***

"Was she your Julia?" Freddie asks. The boy had insisted upon "helping" him settle into his flat, then sprawling out on his bed. It's not as plush as his Paris flat, but it's quite respectable. "Your doubleplusungood girl?"

It's after too much whiskey and a far-too-honest confession of why he has a photo of _The Hour's_ foreign desk chief propped against his bedside lamp, and Freddie hasn't stopped chasing the story since. Not even sex is distracting him, he just keeps hounding Randall about Lix and Spain and has gotten it into his head that Randall's actually done more than just meet Orwell in a pub once. 

(If he had, Randall would have punched the pretentious sod's jaw clean off. Running about with the Partido Obrero when he could have been writing further brilliant novels.)

Randall sighs, neon lights from the record shop across the street burning through his retinas. He thinks he might have slept last Tuesday - or was it Monday? He's still on Paris time.

"Of course she was. She was the last bright thing in all of Spain, my reason for breathing each day. We never think of how quickly love can turn to regret, to resentment. If she sold me - well, I sold her."

She still wears the ring. He'd dreaded the day he eventually got a small white envelope in the mail, small gold ring encased within, because it would mean the death of his last hope of her. But during that first broadcast at Lime Grove, sitting and watching Bel conduct a symphony that Hector refused to play on-key, there it had been. A flash of gold on a chain as Lix paced and swore.

Lazing against Randall, head lolling back against his chest as they smoke, Freddie muses: "Betrayal of heart or mind?"

It still hurts to remember.

"Oh, lad," Randall says, stroking back the too-long fringe from Freddie's forehead. "Sooner or later, we all betray those we love. It makes no difference how."

***

Freddie, of course, has his own Julia - Isobel Rowley, bright and beautiful and the best damned producer Randall's seen in years.

From Freddie's stories, he imagines a warrior; a Diana or Minerva of broadcast journalism, as tenacious as she is fearless. When he first sets foot in Lime Grove, it isn't what he finds. Bel Rowley doesn't fight for stories or revolution, she fights for survival. The fallout of Freddie's audacious broadcast and Hector's waning star has come down straight onto her tiny shoulders.

(He's never been the rescuing type. Regardless, his first impulse when he takes the directorship is to call Freddie and tell him to wrap things up with Camille in Paris because his Julia is in need of him.)

But he watches Bel in the newsroom and marvels at her precision. Like clockwork. Like a soldier - and oh, isn't that ever a delight to see in new talent? He decides to see if she can rise from the ashes, pushes her and pushes her to see if she'll snap or bite back. She keeps showing up, armored in blue or red smartly cut suits and endless wells of patience interspersed with a willingness to cry in front of him if it'll get her point across.

She breaks for him, and that frightens him like naught else. She cries and she begs and he knows that she places far more import on his opinion than ever should be placed. There are words for what he considers doing to her, and none of them are particularly polite. There are further words for what kind of man that would make him.

And so he pulls out a handkerchief, presses it to her tears, and tells her the truth.

"I asked to hear your tick. Do you remember?" She nods, sniffling and trembling, fingers curled around his jacket sleeve. "Sometimes, a clock needs winding. Needs resetting. So cry your fruitless tears for Mr. Madden, because he'll leave whether you do or not. Let him go, because we have a better presenter and a better team and a better producer. I need you on top form tomorrow."

The next morning, she is in his office at 8:58 on the dot, dressed in a suit of deepest red and waving about the latest viewing figures because they're up six points on ITV.

***

Two months in, and he still cannot speak to Lix without one of them walking away.

Everyone notices. There are no secrets in a newsroom, and the gossip mill has been running overtime with Freddie's French wife (lovely girl, shame about that ex-husband in organized crime) and Marnie Madden's cooking show (minor talent, he hopes she's warmer in person than the camera suggests) and Bel's budding story on the police crackdowns. The mill has it on good authority - whose, he'd like to know so he can fire them - that he and Lix were once married, that they slept together and he never called, that she left him for a woman.

(Monogamy had never been an expectation. Her head could be turned by a pretty girl as quickly as his; he appreciated the male form as thoroughly as she did. They knew what they were getting in for.)

Thus, he is quite well aware of what it means when she wears that particular shade of lipstick, when she bothers with jewelry and hangs her coat instead of throwing it about. She hums while she edits tomorrow's copy on Indonesia, even though it will be overshadowed by Lewisham. She tweaks Isaac's hair and compliments Sissy's scarf, and it's intoxicating. It's the burn of a good scotch when all you've been drinking for the past decade is cheap gin.

He catches her as she's leaving for the day, purely out of instinct and blind hope.

"Plans?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Have dinner with me. Pick any spot you like."

He isn't surprised when she takes him to a tiny cantina, flirts with the waitress in Spanish while ordering paella from off the menu, and leans her knee against his under the table. He can see it under her skin, the need to suspend who they are and what they were to each other. She knows that he'll do whatever she asks, because they were good together and because he likes to forget, too. He _shouldn't_ , she's his employee above all, never mind the rest, but he's always been a rebel under the surface.

A lone streetlamp, her flat up two flights, and he kisses her like he's been dying to. Her mouth tastes like everything he's ever missed, cigarettes and wine and spice, sweet and lush and he wants to have her here against the lamppost. Strong and solid and wrapped around him, but she whimpers when he pulls away to kiss her cheeks, her jaw, down the exquisite line of her neck. Recklessly, he whispers how he's going to put his mouth all over her for hours, until he can't see or smell or taste anything but her. She grips his hair and gasps, hips rocking against his until he goes crosseyed with how badly he wants her.

It's the reason he doesn't spot the tail.

***

The photos are on his desk in an unmarked envelope the next morning.

He and Lix aren't the only ones in them.

There are the ones from last night, of course - Lix wrapped around him and that lamppost, her hand halfway into his trousers - but there are others. Himself and Freddie, in a dark corner of the pub they'd gone to a few days back, Freddie tugging him by the tie, smirk on his lips. Bel and Lix, asleep in Bel's flat, tangled into each other on a couch with Bel's head on Lix's chest. Himself and Bel, watching the live feed, heads too-close together. Bel and Freddie, twirling each other in an impromptu dance. There are different angles, enough to demonstrate that this blackmailer is positively wasting his talents if he's this good a photographer. 

There is the usual applied bollocks of a message cobbled together from news clippings: "put an end to your filth or the originals will be mailed to every major news outlet in England".

Randall Brown is not a man who enjoys being told what to do, and so, still seeing red around the edges of his vision, he calls the three of them into his office. Bel is anxious, tugging at the closure of her jacket. Freddie is curious, questioning, pacing like a caged puppy. Lix is silent and still, smoking a cigarette she isn't bothering to flick the ash off of. They are his people, his to shield, but he cannot hide this from them. 

When it is all told, photographs laid out as if they tell the entire story and not just the beginning of one, it is Bel who speaks first.

"Who would do this?"

Freddie scowls, picking up a particularly well-shot closeup of himself kissing Randall's jaw. "You mean who has it out for any one of us? Only the entire bloody country. This could be from anyone."

"What," Lix asks, "more importantly, are we going to _do_?"

No answers are forthcoming.

***

It would have been easy to stop.

As easy, of course, as it had been in 1938 - which is not a year he likes to recall. Everything awash in a haze of whiskey, drowning in work and regret. He'd consigned Lix to his memory hole, destroying everything she'd left save a single photograph from Gandesa; twenty-seven year old Lix, letting a little girl play with her camera strap. A single shot of how he had intended to remember her.

He has much less of Freddie and Bel to excise. He could have put a stop to the late nights at the pub, stealing Freddie's terrible cigarettes and debating the merits of French existentialism. He could have let Bel down easy, gently ousted her from his flat when she came by with a bottle of wine and the genesis of a story. He very probably should have.

He isn't that noble. Once, he might have been, but 1938 taught him that sacrifice causes pain.

So he hoards them closer, and Lix eyes him knowingly, the damnable woman ( _damnatio memorae_ , and it hadn't ever taken). She drops warnings in her honeyed whisper, tells him "careful" and "patience" like she isn't plotting to commit the old sins the same kinds of ways. She whispers rebellion, that they may as well be hung for sheep, and sod whoever thinks they can blackmail the Director of News for the BBC.

"It would be like Huesca. But more." Lix lounges against his doorframe, voice hushed even gone 10 at night. "Do you remember?"

A cafe in Huesca, coffee sipped slowly to spite the POUM. A tiny sprite of a waitress, who liked his glasses and Lix's trousers. Late nights and clove cigarettes and the billiard hall next door. Trading sips of tempranillo between kisses, trading the girl between them spread out on faded blue sheets.

"I'm not in the habit of forgetting," he answers. A lie by omission. "A bold proposition, Ms. Storm. Do you feel it wise?"

"Oh, more foolish than we've ever been. But worth _every_ moment of it."

***

Paris made him many things, but the thing it made him most was complacent. 

He forgets that it is seen as scandalous for a man his age to be out with an unmarried young woman, that the men won't tip their glasses to him knowingly and the women won't smile behind their compacts. In England, he could be called many things - lecher, inappropriate, even, god forbid, paedophile despite the fact that Bel is a grown woman of twenty-six - and arrested, his name and his career dragged through the mud.

But he cannot say no to Bel, not when she marches into his office, shuts his door, and collapses onto his couch as if her strings have been cut. She curls up, feet tucked under her blue dress, golden hair falling across her face. She looks like a Bernini sculpture, and he's always had a weakness for the classics. If he were an artistic man, he would paint her.

"Mr. Madden has made the papers again, I take it?"

She makes a wounded noise, turns slightly toward him to peer out from under her hair, Veronica Lake tragic. "The Guardian found out about the separation. Why must he be so bloody _public_ about it? He had a wonderful, amazing wife, and he threw her away for that showgirl. And now I will never hear the end of it from the gentlemen upstairs, how I should have 'managed' him better, as if you can fucking manage Hector bloody Madden."

It would be easy to pat her shoulder, reassure her, but that way is empty lies and hollow promises. He does try not to lie to her.

"Isobel," he says softly, and she turns tear-stained eyes up to him. He sits down next to her, takes her hand between his. "Forget about it tonight. There is not a single thing you can do, and you've been here for two days straight. I know a spare set of clothes when I see one."

Her mouth is small, soft, and tastes of Pimm's No. 3. If he expects her to be yielding, he is quickly disabused of the notion - she kicks off her shoes and slides onto his lap, takes his hands in hers and fits them to her waist and breasts. She does not need to be rescued, she tells him firmly as she grinds down onto him.

What he doesn't tell her is that she _does_ ; they all do.

***

The next day, it becomes clear he doesn't need to hide what happened - there are more important things to worry about.

The brass are here, ostensibly keeping an eye on Mr. Madden and scrutinizing everything they do, and for some reason, Miss Cooper has come down with a terrible strain of flu and not a single person in the newsroom can get anything organized. He's on edge, has to line up all the pencils in the bullpen and reorganize the pins on the bulletin board from largest to smallest. He starts on the trash heap everyone calls a control board, but Lix gives him that _look_ and fine, he can pacify the itching between his shoulder blades with simply tidying the rubbish. 

He can't shake the feeling that he's missing something - a feeling that continues throughout that day, the night's broadcast (the failed attempt by the Yanks to launch their own rocket, and Lix had been livid that they weren't even including Indonesia), and the thirty minutes of peace he gets before Lix explodes into his office, a bemused Freddie and flustered Bel behind her.

"I cannot believe - no, actually, I can, because you live for tormenting me, don't you? Indonesia has expelled an entire ethnic group of people, many of which are former British citizens, and you don't consider that newsworthy?"

The cleaners have moved his couch again, and he shoves it back into place with his foot. "Of course it is. But we had to lead with the rocket, and you know it."

"Ah yes," she snits, "Minitrue must have its agenda pushed. Never mind that it is blatant fearmongering and-"

He doesn't know what possesses him to kiss her in front of Bel and Freddie, whether it's his own weakness for how beautiful she looks in a rage or whether he's just so tired of the pretense. She gasps into his mouth, her hand tangling into his hair, and dimly, he hears Freddie curse under his breath. Lix breaks the kiss with a low, rueful noise in her throat, and rests her forehead against his. He hears Bel's small gasp, turns his head to find Freddie has her by the wrist, the both of them looking at himself and Lix with identical desire written across their faces. 

Lix curls her fingers into the back of his suit jacket, pitches her voice low enough as not to be overheard and loud enough to carry to the two gorgeous creatures opposite them.

"Darlings, may we dispense with formalities? Randall's flat, twenty minutes. We shan't think less of you if you decide against it, but we would very much like to pursue what's been started."

The breath punched out of him, he can only remember feeling like this once before; a sweltering bombed-out hotel in Valencia, himself and Lix high on coffee and the best film she'd ever taken. He'd fucked her in front of the last windowpane still unbroken, the two of them watching the city burn. This feels like that, this piercing desire to take what he wants and damn the consequences.

If they burn, so be it.

***

The walk from the tube to his flat is not nearly long enough to assuage his fears; he sees police and potential blackmailers everywhere.

Lix is inside the building, waiting for him by the stairs, on her third cigarette by the looks of it. They climb in silence, and when he unlocks his door, she immediately goes for the whiskey on the sideboard. He wishes he could reassure her, but he needs a fortifying drink himself, and she pours him a finger more than his usual two. She's halfway through a fourth cigarette when Bel's nervous tap sounds, and he lets her in, perfume trailing behind her. She glances to Lix first, timid little smile that Lix returns stronger, and plays with the tie to her coat before visibly thinking "sod it" and takes it off. 

Somehow they've tacitly decided not to speak, just a few murmured words between Lix and Bel - if she wants a drink, yes please, gin or scotch? - and Randall flicks his blinds closed. Blocks out the prying eyes, and another knock sounds moments later. As usual, Freddie doesn't wait for the door to open, slinking in and blinking in surprise as he catches sight of Bel.

"Moneypenny?" he asks, voice breaking on the endearment.

She shakes her head. "Since when have you ever known me not to make astonishingly stupid mistakes?"

Astonishingly stupid mistake is right, but he can't bring himself to care when Freddie drops his coat by the door, winds his way around Lix - kissing her cheek as he passes - and stopping in front of Randall. His mind's eye focuses in on Paris, the Persian rug in his flat and Freddie on his knees, telling him to come back to England. He wouldn't make a single decision differently. Freddie takes the glass from his hands - the glass that has kept him from unscrewing the top of the whiskey three times, from straightening all the bottles on his bar - and insinuates himself against Randall. 

"Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past," Freddie quotes, sliding a finger underneath the knot of Randall's tie. 

"Orwell was a twat," Lix says, though she's failing to keep the smile off her face. That could be due to Bel's head resting on her shoulder. "Of course you both love him."

Freddie rolls his eyes affectionately, and kisses his mouth, sneaky and soft. "So what shall be our present, Mr. Brown?"

What, indeed?

Perhaps this will be a memory he can keep unaltered.


End file.
